If internet searches were votes, Nigel Farage's party would be romping to a
majority in the 2015 general election. Ukip is driving more searchers to
websites than any other political party

More people are searching online for UKIP in the run-up to the election than any of the three main parties.

In the fight for search clicks, the party is dwarfing others online, driving more than four times the amount of traffic to websites than any of the other parties.

Since January, searches for the party's name have lead more people to click on websites than searches for the Conservative Party, Labour Party and Liberal Democrats.

There has been a particular upsurge in the past month, with the percentage of readers sent to websites by searching for UKIP more than doubling since March 28.

The other parties have all seen a relatively modest increase, with the Conservatives more than doubling their searches since March 28, but they still have less than a fifth of UKIP's search traffic.

Nigel Farage has also attracted more interest than Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg or David Cameron.

The UKIP leader is significantly ahead of the Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister on searches, and ahead of Ed Miliband by almost a third.

Stats showing how people came from Google through to news and media websites also show that Nigel Farage’s party is streets ahead in terms of online search traffic.

Searches for the party seem to be driving large numbers of people specifically to media websites, far more than for any other political party.

The party is the 71st most frequent term to lead searchers to media websites, significantly ahead of all the other parties.

Farage's party also appears several times in the rankings, under ‘UKIP manifesto’ and ‘UKIP news’ as well as the party name alone.

Figures from Google suggest that on the whole more people are coming to media websites by searching for the fringe parties than for mainstream parties.

There were more than 300,000 searches for UKIP in March, and around 95,000 for both the Green Party and the SNP.

Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats are all out of the top 1,000 search terms, the SNP are at 198 and the Greens are at number 575.

Farage is the 195th most popular term, beaten only by Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's First Minister and leader of the SNP, who appears in the 115th spot.

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The trends also show that the biggest group of visitors to UKIP’s website were relatively young people living in modern housing, followed by healthy, active retired people, and well-educated people with young families.

By contrast, visitors to the Conservative websites tended to be older and wealthier, with the vast majority falling into the second-wealthiest group, dominated by older people with grown-up children.

People arrived at the UKIP website by searching for related terms including 'ukip manifesto' and 'ukip policies', but also for 'hs2'.

Nigel Farage has previously said that Britain is too "skint" to afford the high-speed rail project.